Growing fruit, vegetables, herbs, and plants in small squares is the latest trend for small gardens, balconies, and terraces. With square foot gardening, you can plant and harvest lettuce, carrots, kohlrabi, and much more in limited spaces. It’s great fun, and you’ll enjoy fresh produce almost all year round. We’ll explain how it works!

Square foot gardening was invented around 50 years ago but is currently experiencing a revival as more and more people want to grow vegetables. Thanks to its space-saving concept, it works perfectly in raised beds, on balconies and terraces, or in backyards. With this method, vegetables, herbs, and even some fruits are grown in small square beds measuring 30x30 cm or 40x40 cm. Multiple squares are combined to form a larger square or rectangular bed. This approach allows for a wide variety of plants to thrive in a small space, ensuring you never grow too much of any one vegetable, but always just enough to use efficiently.

A square foot garden bed should always have a width of 120 cm, so you can easily reach the vegetables from both sides. This is similar to a traditional vegetable garden. On a base area of 120x120 cm, you can fit either 12 mini-beds of 40x40 cm or 16 mini-beds of 30x30 cm. There are ready-made beds available that you can set up directly on-site, fill with soil, and start planting.

Building one yourself is also an option and not difficult. With a good cordless screwdriver, you can assemble the bed frame in no time. Start with a 20–30 cm high frame made of wood or another garden-friendly material such as recycled plastic, Corten steel, old bricks, or willow edging.

For a 120x120 cm frame bed, you’ll need just four boards, each 20–30 cm high and 120 cm long and use corrosion-resistant stainless steel screws to fix it together. For the grid, you’ll also need four or six slats, each 120 cm long, depending on whether you want 12 or 16 mini-beds. Simply screw these slats onto the bed frame.

Even though square beds can be placed anywhere, you should still pay attention to the right location. Sun to partial shade is optimal for vegetables. Use a filter fleece or another water-permeable sheet as a base. Place the frame onto the base and fill it with soil. Good compost soil is just as suitable as a mixture of 1:1:1 garden soil, compost, and sand. Then you can get started with sowing and planting. Using garden hand tools from Bosch, such as the planting trowel, will help you.

On seed packets, you’ll find precise instructions about the spacing for sowing seeds. These guidelines apply to traditional garden beds, where hoeing and weeding are common tasks. These activities are rarely needed with square foot gardening. The plants in the mini-beds usually grow quickly and soon cover the soil, giving weeds little chance to establish. This allows you to sow and plant more densely. Plant markers will help you keep track of what’s growing.

Broccoli: 1 plant
Bush beans: 5 plants
Cucumbers: 1 plant
Kohlrabi: 4 plants
Carrots: 16 plants
Peppers: 1 plant
Leeks: 8 plants
Beetroot: 9 plants
Lettuce: 4 plants
Spinach: 16 plants
Tomatoes: 1 plant
Courgettes: 1 plant
Onions: 16 plants

If things get a bit crowded and the lettuce, radishes, or onions start competing for space, you can simply harvest earlier. A few outer lettuce leaves can be picked quickly, small onions taste delicious when lightly fried in soups, and young radishes can be eaten along with their leaves, and nothing goes to waste.

The vegetables do grow more closely together than in a traditional garden, but even so, square beds are no paradise for pests. This is because square foot gardening creates a highly diverse mixed culture, which is unattractive to pests that need larger clusters of the same plant species to spread effectively.

However, you should pay attention to crop rotation when sowing and planting. It’s better not to plant broccoli, carrots, or cucumbers in the same bed repeatedly. Avoid vegetables from the same family, such as brassicas, which include all cabbage varieties that are particularly prone to pests. These plants shouldn’t be placed next to each other in the bed. Carrots pair well with leeks, beans work alongside Swiss chard, and radishes are good companions for loose-leaf lettuce. Good plant neighbours are just as important for vegetables!

If you'd like to know more about when to carry out specific gardening tasks, you can find the right times to do the important activities in our garden calendar.